States say to feds: Get off our turf

The wave of government bailouts and the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package are reviving interest in an issue that’s largely been dormant since the mid-1990s: states’ rights.

From Idaho to South Carolina and in dozens of other states, Republicans are sponsoring resolutions designed to call attention to what they view as a worrisome expansion of the federal government at the expense of the states.

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“What we have is a federal government that is exceeding its authority and blackmailing the states into submission through printed dollars,” said Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Sam Rohrer. “We are trying to say to the federal government, ‘You have a role, but your role stops not too far outside Washington, D.C.’”

Rohrer has been shepherding a bill that declares sovereignty for Pennsylvania “under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States.”

He said he was particularly concerned that the federal stimulus package would lead states to become dependent on the federal government.

“This administration has the ability to stick it in the eye of the states and to really pointedly attempt to undo everything that’s been in place,” Rohrer said. “They want to throw Reaganomics out; they want to step in and tell companies what they can or can’t do.”

Rohrer is not alone in his efforts. In North Dakota, the state House and Senate approved a bill in April telling the government to “halt its practice of assuming powers and imposing mandates on the states for purposes not enumerated in the Constitution of the United States.”

A similar resolution in Tennessee said: “Today, in 2009, the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government.” That bill recently passed the state’s Republican-controlled House by a vote of 85-2.

Texas and Georgia have taken the state sovereignty issue one step further. GOP lawmakers in those states, as well as Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, have been talking up the idea of secession.

The Georgia state Senate recently passed a resolution raising the possibility of secession, and several of the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidates supported it.

In Texas, after an anti-tax “tea party” in April, Perry appeared to put the possibility of secession on the table.

“We’ve got a great union,” Perry told reporters. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”

Following up on Perry’s much-publicized remark, a Rasmussen poll of Texas voters found that 18 percent said they would vote to secede from the United States and form an independent country, compared with 76 percent who said they would vote for Texas to remain in the United States.

The mantle of states’ rights has been taken up almost exclusively by Republicans, who find themselves completely shut out of control of the federal, legislative and executive branches for the first time since 1994.